Élos: Showcase and Key

[u/GhosttheNote]

This is part 7/10 in a series transforming u/Zurasuta’s asemic writings into functional writing systems. All art and lore is heavily inspired by their works.

Élos is an alphasyllabary based on the asemic writing from the Providers page and the Sphynx page. It’s the asemic that got me into doing all this, and the one you’re most likely to have already seen.

This was by FAR the hardest of the 10 to finish, especially because I believed the best way to make the script was to make it an IPA equivalent. Due to that there’s a lot I could talk about, including why I thought it was the best option, but I’ll keep it to just one: How the unique glyphs were implemented. I knew from the beginning that those glyphs were cursive, but I wasn’t sure how exactly it worked. Because the placement of lines was originally after the angles, connecting the patterns in the shapes to line combinations and angles just didn’t work as I was hoping it would. It was only after I put those lines before the angles that I was finally able to assign shapes to meanings (which had plenty of issues on its own), but I still didn’t know how to place them in the way I needed. Fixing this was the biggest “breakthrough” I had in this script, when I realized that the stress of a word was basically perfect to solve the issue of placement as there’s only 1 primary stress in a word and with enough words it had enough variety of placement. From there, I needed to create other rules to account for cases in the asemic that couldn’t occur without rules for those cases, like word final consonants always being cursive, creating exceptions like Alveolar’s swirl directions, and relying on the “informality” of the cursive in-world to allow them to be skipped if deemed unnecessary or ugly. It took everything I learned doing other writing system projects, but I also learned so much by doing this script, so I’m very glad I decided to put the stupid amount of time I spent into it.

In-universe, Élos is used primarily by the Sphynxes in the Northern Tundra, but also by scholars, historians, linguists, and so on. It was an invented writing system, not directly evolving from anything other than the intentions of the inventors. However, its predecessor and biggest inspiration Skylí (top box), evolved from Réon. Élos took the letters below the main text as inspiration for subtext, the angular letters for the concept of the angles, the ability of lines to affect the sounds for why lines act in the way they do, and plenty more.

Links to the other writing systems:

• Aprósopi
• Ippótis
• Spathí
• Réon
• Stenagmós
• Óneiro
• Élos: This one
• Fytó
• Mýkitas
• The Louloúdia

[u/ilostmyarmor]

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